'This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and like the X-Files said, the truth is out there. But is it really in the hands of the federal government?

I think disclosure is great, but it's got to produce something. It can't just be this endless, endless circle. Stick around.

What did you steal?

There's a new Steven Spielberg UFO movie out. It's called Disclosure Day.

The human race cannot accept what we know. We need to stop it any way we can.

This is the guy who made E.T. And Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so while he didn't invent the genre, Spielberg's films have really shaped the images so many of us have in our minds when we think about extraterrestrial life. And here's the thing, this movie is being released at a time where very real conversations are happening around extraterrestrial lives. What, if anything, is out there, and what does the U.S. Government know about?

'As promised by the president, the Pentagon has started releasing what it calls never-before-seen UFO files, more than 160 in the first bash, some dating back to the 1940s. Last month, the Trump...

Administration started releasing declassified files around sightings of UAPs. Some say unidentified anomalous phenomena, some say unidentified aerial phenomena, but either way that's what we're calling UFOs these days. A lot of these sightings can be chalked up to weather balloons or meteoroids or optical illusions, but that burst of transparency came not long after former president Barack Obama told the YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen something that lit up the internet back in February.

Are aliens real?

They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51.

Obama later clarified those comments a bit, saying, quote, I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. All of this is doing nothing to quiet down conspiracy theories that there's some grand coverup at play, that people in power know the truth, but that they're keeping it from us. What does it say about our society that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that? And if they were to see proof of intelligent life, would they actually accept it? Adam Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and the author of The Little Book of Aliens. So Adam, there have been three of these document dumps from the Pentagon thus far, the latest one coming just this week. Can you just walk me through what exactly was in them?

You know, there was a lot of hype about this, that this was disclosure, you know, finally we were gonna get documents that tell us something about what the government knows about UFOs and whether or not these UFOs connect to us being visited by aliens. And of course, as an astrobiologist who studies life in the universe, I'm super excited about anything which might tell us about that question. And unfortunately, these documents were a potpourri. Of, you know, things we've seen the entire history of UFOs.

Crackling with videos and photos showing cryptic images of what appear to be very peculiar flying craft, the release by the Pentagon has UFO and UAP watchers buzzing.

There were documents going all the way back to the 50s basically and you know it was government interviews you know, it was people from the government interviewing people who had claimed to have seen UFOs.

Among them, a bit of unusual audio between the capsule and ground control during the 1965 Gemini 7 mission.

This is Houston. Say again, 7? We have a bogey at 10 o'clock time. Do you have any more information, estimate distance or size? Looks like 100 is a little...

There were lots of videos with no background, or not much background, from the military where you see some kind of blob. Sometimes it was hard. Yeah, but it's really grainy. So you're like, what am I looking at here? Exactly, yeah.

'In 2022, there are reports of a military sensor tracking a UAP moving from north to south and in another report flying from west to east. In 2024, a teardrop-shaped craft and an uneven ball of white light and a diamond-shaped vessel traveling nearly 500 miles an hour are all reported by military observers in general.

It's exactly, it's the whole history of UFOs, fuzzy blob videos, and an unverifiable testimony, personal testimony, which is the worst form of evidence, sadly. And so, given the explosive testimony we heard in Congress about government having alien bodies, this was pretty disappointing.

You mentioned that testimony, because I am wondering if the federal government has approached this more rigorously or in a different way in recent years than they have in the past. Well, you know, the modern.

Era of UFO UAPs, right? 2017, the New York Times did that story, which said, look, there is this Pentagon program to study UFOs, which were rebranded as unidentified aerial phenomena.

They're all going against the wind. The wind's a hundred and twenty knots to the west. I'm all pink, dude.

And there were those three Navy videos from Navy fighters that were released.

Well, the first thing... It's roasted!

And since then, the government has, we see a lot more activity from the government and you see these congressional testimonies and the good thing about it has been that there's been a willingness for people to step forward and say, I saw something. Like having those Navy pilots being willing to say, I saw, something I didn't understand is great. But also there has been just a wash of testimony that is so explosive without any substantiation, without anything to verify. Everybody says, I know a guy who knows a guy who saw the spaceship, but nobody's ever actually seen the spaceship themselves or can give us any kind of real data, actual data, pictures, numbers from experiment, you know, tests that were done. And so in that way it feels, it's beginning, And especially with these new data dumps. It's beginning to feel like an ongoing circular conversation.

Well, you wrote a piece in the Atlantic last month called Just Show Us the Spaceships Already. I don't even know if I have a question. I just like hard agree, like show us something. Well, that's exactly what.

It is, and these, you know, the Congressional testimony was over the top. Mr. Gresh, finally, do you believe that our government is in possession of UAPs?

Absolutely based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over four years.

And where?

I know the exact locations and those.

Locations were provided to the inspector general that there are these secret government program

'that are routinely capturing downed spaceships and that there are, you know, what do they call it, non-human biologics, which is not even a term in science I've ever used, got invented, it feels like, in the congressional testimonies.

And have you seen any of the bodies? That's something I've not witnessed myself. OK. And so as

As an astrobiologist who cares deeply about this question, it's the most important question humans can ask. Are we alone? Is there life elsewhere? I found that testimony both explosive and then was quite sort of angered that there was no actual evidence for a claim like this being made public. So I think disclosure is great, but it's gotta produce something. It can't just be this endless circle. I mean at some point you either show us the spaceship, show us the alien bodies, or show us the tests that were done, because clearly we've all seen the movie, right? There's an alien body that's wheeled into a laboratory, and then the scientists do lots of tests on them. Where are the data from those tests? Something that a scientist like me could say like, oh, they found extra oxygen in the blood, or there was more calcium than I would have expected in a biological sample. Something you could actually get your teeth into. Where's that? And so, you know, I think the danger here is it's going to be an endless circular conversation, and we're never going to get actually any kind of real data, which means to me that the data isn't there. I was going to say, do you believe there is extraterrestrial life out there? I think, you, know, the universe is vast. I think it would be remarkable if there wasn't life on other planets, but there is a huge difference that people need to understand between S A I N G Yeah, there's good chance that there's life in the universe and saying it's here, right? Hiding, but not hiding very well, right, there's this big distinction between those two and somehow they always get, this is what happened actually I think, which drove the whole conversation we're having because when Obama made that statement, which sort of triggered all this, he was saying he thinks life is out there as opposed to UFOs are aliens and they're visiting us. Those are two very different claims.

Right. I mean, a recent CBS YouGov poll found that 63% of Americans believe that there is intelligent life on other planets. That's up from 50% back in 2010. It's not like we've seen any evidence in that time, though. So why are more people believing in this? Well, it's because I...

I think the science is really changing quite a bit. Astrobiology has gone through these incredible revolutions in the past 10, 20, 30 years. When I was a graduate student, we didn't know whether there were any planets orbiting any other stars, right? It could have been that our solar system with Earth and Venus and Mars were freaks that they're just, you know, planets were hard to make. Instead, we now know that every star you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. So every star you see in the sky has planets, rocky planets where you could stand on them, right? Where there's perhaps snow falling in mountain valleys. So that has expanded our understanding of the possibilities of life. More recently now, using the James Webb Space Telescope, we've acquired the capacity to see into the atmospheres of those planets, to be able to tell whether there's a biosphere there or whether there is even a technosphere. I mean that That's what I want people to understand is the science of astrobiology is exploding. And I think within 10, 20, or 30 years, because, you know, science takes time, we will have real data that speaks to this question. And I don't know what that data will say. It may tell us that life is rare. It may tells us that is common, but we're gonna actually have data.

Alright, gotta take a break. When we come back, why we start to look to the stars when things get tough down here on Earth? Stick around. Why do we all want to know so badly the answer to this question? Isn't there enough going on on Earth right now?

'I think it's exactly that. Isn't there enough going on on Earth with life right now? We recognize that life is strange, right? Life is unlike any other physical system. Putting it mildly. Yeah, right. You know, life innovates. Life is the only system that innovates, that creates via evolution, etc. And so, and we as an example of life, as an example of self-conscious life that has this amazing thing called a society that we seem to screw up all the time. We are deeply interested about whether or not are we an accident in the entire universe with its 10 Billion trillion. That's the actual number of 10 billion trillion Planets where life could have formed. Are we the only time it's happened or is life common is life You know, are we part of actually a community of of cosmic life? Including other intelligent civilizations, which maybe we could learn something from. Like if we even knew that there was a civilization that lasted more than two or three hundred years, right, a technological civilization, that would be a huge thing, right? Just we didn't, we wouldn't even have to meet them if we just knew that they had been around on their planet, say for 10,000 years. It would show us at least that that's possible, which would be of huge comfort.

I mean, is there any kind of pattern we can see throughout history, like when times get really tough for us humans, when things are polarized, when there's just bad news all around us, do people start looking to the stars more and start wondering about these questions?

'I think there certainly is when things are, when there's a lot of upheaval, people tend to ask bigger questions. They tend to ask about the nature of their own lives, the setting of life and society. But I really think what's happening here is unique, because in the entire history of humanity, right, in the entirely 300,000 years that we have been a species, we have never had these capacities. Like, literally, I'm getting data now. I can see data. From the atmosphere of a planet that is 300 light years away. And people have to understand one light year, the fastest thing we've ever invented would take 100,000 years to cross one light-year. I'm being able to see whether or not there's carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere of these planets that are 300 light-years away. There's something really unique is going on here.

That same poll that I mentioned earlier found that eight in 10 Americans believe that the US government knows more than it is telling about this subject. And like, you can see that same kind of sentiment with the Jeffrey Epstein files, the JFK assassination. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but for someone like you who deals with the facts, the hard truth, how do you contend with that conspiratorial mindset?

'Uh, it is so common right now, you know, I do a lot of work with climate change. I've been watching for years as this, you know, flood of science denial, um, has overwhelmed us, you know, first science, you know, the denial of the climate change, and then we got to the vaccines and then everything else. And it's not like, look, the government, you know, governments definitely hide things, right? That's the nature of government. So transparency is great. We should demand that the government is transparent with us. When it comes to UFOs, there's been this long history. People need to really understand the history, going back to 1947. And there's always been these claims. There was a book in 1956 where a guy, ex-air force officer said, oh, there was this report that said, you know, UFOs were, and it was interesting, interplanetary, right? Nobody was thinking interstellar then. It shows the mindset. And of course, nobody ever found that report, right. So, and so I just think there's a way in which UFOs have always been part of that government conspiracy thing, and now that we are so impossibly overwhelmed by science denial, it becomes very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. And that's why I have a feeling what may happen with this, if we don't actually get real disclosure or there's nothing there in the disclosure, this will just become exactly like the JFK files, where like, no matter what gets released, the conspiracy people want argue with each other and everybody else just moves on.

'But that's what I want to ask, because say we do get to a point where either the government has something to share with us that is real, verifiable, or science comes up with some big new discovery and they try to announce it to the world. Are there going to be a big chunk of people who don't believe it for whatever reason? You know-

If there's actual, I don't think that would happen, because this is the great thing about science, is like, you can only pretend for so long. And if the government were really to release something that then laboratories around the world could start working on, I think the questions would be resolved. Certainly when it comes to my own field in astrobiology, if we were to find a planet that we thought was showing signs, what we call biosignatures or technosignatures, It's not like that would be the end. That would be the beginning. Then we'd build bigger telescopes, and we'd study it again, and we'd ask different kinds of questions. So once you start getting real data, the whole purpose of science is to not fool ourselves, and once you start getting real data now it's like not one thing, now it becomes a hundred things, and a thousand things, ten thousand pieces of evidence that all interrelate. You're learning things, you're using that learning to push new understanding, so I Don't worry about that.

But I mean, you just said there's all kinds of science denialism out there right now. And there's also deep fakes and AI online where people are questioning the veracity of what they're seeing right in front of their eyes. So how would something so monumental not run the risk of being flatly rejected by folks who might be more prone to conspiratorial thinking who want to think that there's some big secret out there still.

'Well, listen, I mean, one thing my experience on Twitter with, you know, the UFO bros, as I like to call them, is nothing's going to change their mind. Like, there's nothing, I'll never expect those people to change their mind, they have a pre-established bias and nothing will get in, right? But that's not most people and say, like, you know, with science denial, say climate denial, the climate change is happening at some point, you just can't deny it anymore, right. A small group of people. People do. Yeah, no, but once that's because right with climate change right now We're not even in the teaser trailer for climate change a hundred years from now climate change will not be deniable, right? I'm sure that i'm sure there might be some people will but you know, that's when really I think you know You're going to see demand for action So once things get to a certain point you will always have a group of people who want to deny have their own things but I think for the general public the Majority of people will sort of come along for the ride with the science because it's exciting

I always hear from climate scientists that the point that you're describing where it will be completely irrefutable is disaster, complete calamity around us everywhere. What if that's the case for extraterrestrial life?

Let's say tomorrow, my group, my collaborators, we find strong evidence for, say, city lights on another planet. The light we're seeing is artificial, it's clearly artificial, you can't explain it, and we announce that, right? And then some people are like, that's crazy, it's not crazy, so you see the usual sort of thing happening. But then we start focusing on this planet, and now we find like, oh my God, there's also chlorofluorocarbons in that atmosphere. And so now we build a bigger telescope, and now, we are able to like zoom in a little bit more, and we see, we're able to resolve enough to see like, wow, there's places on the planet where there's extra heat being generated, like, you know, in sort of industrial zones. You know, and so sure, there will always be some group of people who are like gonna deny the whole thing, but as we build larger and larger data sets, the evidence becomes convincing enough that I think the more data and the more science we do and the one piece of science leads to another piece of science, I think you'll start building a pretty convincing case that most people will enjoy following.

Well, that's a very rational way of thinking about it. And I guess we can only hope that the public would kind of sign up for that. Adam, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

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